


Origin

by Harukami



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, novel canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 10:24:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shion isn't doing very well at home, and needs to find his way back to his humanity.  Post-canon (novel), spoilers</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origin

Sometimes Shion thinks he can see the corruption on himself when he looks in the mirror. It's no longer what he thought it was, the white hair or the snake wrapped around him like it could choke the life out of his throat. No, that, in some ways, became the symbol of his freedom. The person he had been in No.6 had suffered and come out of it safely and changed under Nezumi's care. It's still a stranger that looks back at him, the unpigmented hair and paler skin and flushed raised red welts, but it's a stranger he's come to love in a way he never even thought about when the person who had looked back had been normal.

The corruption now is more subtle. He doesn't see it in how he looks but how he carries himself. He sees a sharper look around his eyes, a darker look, greater hollows in his throat and collarbones, spindlier fingers, a narrower chest and waist. Karan has commented a few times now that it seems like he's losing weight even though he's back home now, lives in a bakery now -- it's true. He can't bring himself to eat more than often enough and he has too much work to think about it. 

It's killing him, he thinks, not the lack of food but what it symbolizes. No.6 is like a fever in him; his white blood cells are his desire to improve the situation, but the situation itself is an infection in him, draining his life force. He'd never wanted to come back here. Other people had -- it was always about what had been forced on him. Safu had left things to him. The doctor had left things to him. Nezumi, too, had left it to him, and then left. 

But what could he do? If he leaves it to someone else he'd be doing the same thing that was done to him. If he doesn't, he can't guarantee it wouldn't go to chaos behind him, that the careful committees and choices he'd made and controlled wouldn't be undermined. And then -- what? It's not his responsibility, but who else will do it?

So, let it kill him, he thinks, and wishes Nezumi would come back and help him find his own humanity.

 

One night, he dreams of Safu. She's the way he always remembered her, pretty and brisk and unrelenting, gazing into his face. "You look terrible," she says.

"Thanks," he says mildly. "You're looking well."

"Under the circumstances," she says. "What are you doing with yourself? You're such an idiot. Then again, that's something I always liked about you."

He laughed, unable to really stop himself, not really wanting to regardless. "Eh, but if I was, we wouldn't have met--"

"It's not your brain that's the problem," Safu says. "Your brain can resist just about anything, can't it? That's the real problem, the thickness of your skull. You've got a terminal case of it."

"Terminal, huh..."

"Think," she says. "What do I really want?"

He does think, considers her standing in front of him with the forest's branches blowing easily in the strong, humming wind. He says, "I don't think I've ever understood what you wanted unless you spelled it out to me. I'm a bit oblivious."

"You're a natural," she says. And, "Stop trying to guess what other people want and think from your own point of view. You'll never understand other people if you try to interpret them with no basis of personal understanding. Who are you? At your core. Where did the person you know as 'you' begin?"

There were a hundred answers to this that he could give, easy answers like _my birth?_ and other inconsequentialities, but when she put it like that he already knew the answer. He became the person he thought of as _Shion_ that night he threw open the window and screamed into the storm despite it being stupid, and the night he saved a convict. He became himself when he looked into those grey eyes and decided that the storm was his reality, not rules, that something nobody could control lurked under his skin waiting to emerge and that he wanted to focus it toward -- what? Nezumi. Just that. What a selfish origin story, he thinks.

"Thanks, Safu," he says.

"You get it now? Maybe. I wish I could believe it. You're so hopeless, Shion," she says, and smiles at him and turns and vanishes back into the forest and he throws his arms open and lets the oncoming storm throw him back into wakefulness.

 

He works carefully the next few weeks. He sets up committees with backup members, promotes people, gets rid of the untrustworthy people, the people who he could ferret hidden motivations out of, brutally enough that he questions himself, but he can't stop now, can he?

It doesn't matter what other people want for you, he thinks.

It doesn't matter what other people expect for you, he thinks.

He thinks: If you let them, they'll always overrule your life and shape it for you. That's why No.6 failed in the first place. It was a place where lives were overruled.

He creates ties and alliances with the other cities, ones which never were built on ideals of perfection like No.6, and ones that, likewise, never fell to the depths that No.6 fell to. If No.6 cannot isolate itself, it cannot become its own failed ecosystem. If it's part of the world, there will always be some kind of accountability. That can't be left to one person. What had he been thinking?

And while he does this, while he contacts other cities, he digs up what information he can on what's really important.

 

Shion says goodbye to his mother properly this time. She cries, but she's smiling, and she's proud of him. She says: "Good. Bring him back when he's ready, okay?"

"Of course, Mom," he says, and takes the food she packs him. He ate his fill before saying goodbye, but it'll be a long trip.

As he heads out, a fat, elderly mouse scurries out of his pocket and perches on his shoulder, singing at him. He smiles back, bright. "Ready, Tsukiyo?"

 

It's a long trip. A lot of walking, driving, riding a bike he manages to purchase out in No.4. A lot of following up on rumors and things he's heard from travellers. But managing a city taught him how to manage information and sort through the useless for the meaningful. When he sees him, he pedals fast enough his heart might burst, hits the break in a cloud of desert dust.

Nezumi has settled into a defensive crouch, knife out, but as the dust clears their eyes meet. As always, his eyes look like they could capture Shion's soul. He sees the recognition in them and smiles.

"I couldn't wait," he says. "I'm sorry."


End file.
